ASIA MYSTERIOSA

ASIA MYSTERIOSA

The Oracle of Astral Force as a Means of Communication with “the Little Lights of the Orient”

By Zam Bhotiva

Published by Polair Publishing
160 pages, paperback

As the story goes, in 1908, Mario Fille, a young man of French-Italian ancestry, met a hermit named Father Julian (Pater Giuliano) who was from a small town in the hills outside Rome. Julian gave the young man a set of old parchments he said contained the direct connection to an oracle but told him the process for obtaining answers from the oracle entailed a lengthy and complex working of the questions using both numbers and words.

It wasn’t until 1920 that Fille first attempted to use the oracle. He was delighted that it worked perfectly as he was told it would, although the answers appeared variously in Italian, German, or English.

Recalling something of this story from a book entitled Arktos by Joscelyn Godwin, I consulted my library and found that volume. Because Godwin so succinctly relates what happened next in the story, I quote him here from page 88 of Arktos:

“One of the first questions to ask such an oracle is ‘Who are you?’ Working with his friend and fellow-musician Cesare Accomani, Fille learned that this was called the ‘Oracle of Astral Energy’: that it was not a method of divination like some Kabbalistic oracles or the I Ching, but an actual channel of communication with the ‘Rosicrucian Initiatic Center of Mysterious Asia’, situated in the Himalayas and directed by the ‘Three Supreme Sages’ or the ‘Little Lights of the Orient’, who live in – Agartha. These at first included Father Julian, then, after his passing on 8 April 1930, purported to come from a ‘Chevalier Rose-Croix’ who was guessed to be a favourite of the neo-Theosophists, the ‘Master Racoczy’, sometime incarnated as Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, and the Comte de Saint-German.

“Fille and Accomani settled in Paris, where the Oracle was demonstrated to a group of journalists and writers in the hope that they would publicise it. Some were favourably enough impressed to contribute to Accomani’s book about it: Asia Mysteriosa, published in 1929 under the pseudonym of ‘Zam Bhotiva’….”

This first English translation of the book contains the original contributions of three of those journalists/writers: a short Preface by Fernand Divoir followed by a brief essay each by Maurice Magre and Jean Marqués-Riviére. The text itself is preceded by a 29-page Introduction from Colum Hayward, who has done an admirable job editing the entire volume.

The original Appendix is entitled The Polaires, which is the name of the Paris group formed to deal with the communications received from the oracle. That Appendix lists the principal aims of the organisation, the most notable for me being “To combat egotism, the worst of sins, in order to overcome or at least modify it,” “To teach that the bitter struggle of life is necessary and that nothing good, nothing noble, is obtained easily,” and to learn “about life on other planets.”

The name “Polaires” is derived from the belief that Agartha, The Great White Lodge, was once located in Hyperborea at the North Pole (some say the South Pole) of the Earth, but moved to the Himalayas as a result of an ancient pole shift. It is thought that from Agartha issues the direction of spiritual activities on our planet.

Some other names purported to be members of, or later associated with, the Polaires “Brotherhood” include authors Rene Guénon, Julius Evola and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British medium Grace Cooke, and the Nazi Otto Rahn.

While the Method was never to be disclosed, we find that numbers and symbols played a big part in operating the Oracle of Astral Force, especially the upward pointing triangle and, inside it, the numbers in descending order of 3, 33, and 333, or, by addition, 3, 6, and 9. Subsequently, two overlapped triangles, one pointing up and one down, became the Polaires’ signature symbol.

Let me conclude this review with four short quotes from the book that may strike a resonant chord in the reader, as they did in me: “The transformation of our existence depends entirely on ourselves….”

“Over all this philosophy there hovers a detachment from worldly things, so that the return to the Ineffable takes place without passing through the tortuous paths of future lives…”

“The worlds which must be travelled in countless existences are numberless, but what is certain is that no return is made to the same world.”

“Thus, throughout Asia, there exists an immense Fraternity; no earthly image can give any idea of this and no description can be applied to it.”